This podcast is sponsored by L.L. Bean, who makes it easy and fun to simply step outside.

That might be breaking a speed record in a rugged built for fun Sonic Snow tube,

walking an extra block in a warm weather resistant

down jacket or just taking a breath on your doorstep before cozying up in a quilted

sweatshirt. For however you experience the outdoors, shop clothing and gear at

L.L.com. Be an outsider. The 150 years ago the United States established its first national park, a place like no other on earth full of fuming mud pots, towering waterfalls, spectacular geysers, and a chorus of wildlife beyond

anything man could imagine.

Yellowstone was not the first land preserved to protect its unique beauty and fragile ecosystem, but it was the world's first National Park.

I'm Jay Sneperson, and this is the America's National Parks Podcast. America's first federally protected land was, believe it or not, a grove of live oak trees

in Gulf Breeze, Florida.

The angled branches of a live oak were perfect for shipbuilding,

especially being near Pensacola Bay. President John Quincy Adams set the land aside

really our first national forest in 1828 and it's now a part of the

Gulf Islands National Seashore. Some sources list Hot Springs in Arkansas as the first national

park but it wouldn't gain that status until 1921, 49 years after

Yellowstone became a National Park. Like the Naval Live Oak Grove, it was set aside to

preserve and distribute a utilitarian resource, hot water,

well before the National Park idea was born.

Yosemite became a park before Yellowstone, but a State Park, disappointed with the results.

26 years later in 1890, Congress made Yosemite one of three additional national parks,

along with Sequoia and General Grant, now part of Kings Canyon.

Mount Rainier followed in 1899.

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